Are you having trouble sifting through and understanding your company’s data? Are you finding it difficult to find any meaningful form of information within the depths of your data? If you are like most businesses, you have huge sets of constantly changing data that you need to sort through and analyze. In the business world, this type of data has a term: “big data”.

Big data is just that – big. It is the huge amounts of data gathered by businesses in an attempt to analyze their processes and success. However, many companies are finding it difficult to glean anything meaningful from the massive amounts of data they are required to work with. Business Intelligence (BI) could be the solution to today’s big data problems.

Data warehouses

Big data is usually stored in a data warehouse – that is if you want to be able to analyze and interpret data for use in your everyday business. A data warehouse can incorporate Business Intelligence (BI) tools, which take extracts of data into a repository to allow you to access the key information you need without referring to the whole dataset. However, not every data warehouse provides you with the capabilities your business requires, as many vendors are currently in the process of evolving their solutions from solely an information store to providing analysis tools for extracting more meaningful data.

Gartner recently stated that “we are seeing data warehouse platforms evolve from an information store supporting traditional business intelligence (BI) platforms to a broader analytics infrastructure supporting operational analytics, corporate performance management and other new applications and uses, such as operational BI and performance management.” This indicates that the market is shifting from storage and access to delivery and comprehension. In fact Gartner predicts that by 2013 most data warehouse vendors will offer something that is based more around information management and data extraction.

Envisioning the future

If you have large sets of regular data that are input into your business systems and you don’t have the tools to manage your data effectively, you may end up with lots of data with no way to analyze trends or patterns. Modern businesses demand much more than just joining up common tasks within their company and are now more concerned with getting meaningful information out. A recent study from IBM showed that 83 % of CIOs have visionary plans that include business intelligence and analytics, confirming that businesses really want to act on the huge amounts of data that they have at their disposal.

Understanding business data

We believe that businesses want to gain a better understanding of their data to so they can plan for the future and make decisions based on fact. Business intelligence is a fundamental part of any business.

More and more businesses want to use the data they have accumulated over the years and be able to access it easily and interpret information. Business Intelligence allows businesses to have greater control and agility through better visibility of data and multi-dimensional analysis, so they can measure key metrics enabling them to spot things like underperformance and take necessary action.

In this economic climate, the ability to make informed decisions is key. Business Intelligence allows businesses to identify who their top customers are, which products are selling the most, what’s most profitable and what’s in stock/on order so they can plan effectively, ensuring that customers are kept happy and profits are maximized.